FastCompany interview with Canadian filmmaker Katerina Cizek whose latest project on High Rises is inspired by digitizing pop-up storybooks

“With the invention of cinema, the first film was a documentary. With the first introduction of sound, who was there? Documentarians. The same with handheld cameras. I think it’s no surprise that some of the most important innovation in new storytelling comes from documentaries. We need as documentarians not only to tell stories about how technology changes our lives, but to use that technology to tell the story, too. It’s not a digital revolution anymore--the digital revolution is over, and we’re in a digital age, and we need to understand how that’s rewiring us.”

In space there is no weight and no noise…so the making of the movie took extraordinary measures

“The requirement of realism, paradoxically, compelled Cuarón and his team to pre-visualize the entire film, shot for shot, long in advance of bringing Sandra Bullock and co-star George Clooney onset. This was an animation technique. Each shot was blocked, timed, and the actors "key-framed," creating an "animatic" of the entire script.

Animators had to unlearn years of expectations. Everybody "knows" that objects fly on curved trajectories to the ground based on their weight. But in orbit, weight translates to inertia, there is no ground, and there is only the tiniest hint of gravitational force to change the path.

"It took a lot of education for the animators to fully grasp that the usual laws of cause and effect don’t apply," Cuarón said in a press statement. "In outer space, there is no up; there is no down."

It took more than two years of this "previs" process before the director's first "Action!" call.”

"Dozens
of top animators, artists, technicians, and designers contributed to
making Disney Animated an unprecedented hands-on experience. Disney
Animated gives you access to an astonishing amount of material from all
eras of Walt Disney Animation Studios, beginning with Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs (1937) and continuing through an exclusive first look at
concept art, animation tests, and visual effects from the upcoming film
Frozen."

Time (sub required) on the revived show whose new season streams starting today

"In a real way, it's not just Arrested Development that's being rebooted
here; it's the entire TV business. Netflix, which earlier this year
premiered the Kevin Spacey political drama House of Cards (at a reported
production cost of $100 million for two seasons), is betting big on a
future in which original TV comes through the Internet, via computers,
set-top boxes or sundry iThingies. When Arrested was canceled, it was a
blip in network-TV history. But the revived version could be the biggest
thing in whatever TV is about to become.

"So Hurwitz (who co-directed every episode of the new season with Troy
Miller) shot scenes like jigsaw pieces, depending on who was available.
Hurwitz recalls, "Some days our call sheet would say Episode 406, 408,
409, 412 and 401. Bateman, whose straight-arrow,
white-sheep-of-the-family Michael Bluth appears in every new episode,
worked out a front-loaded schedule to shoot all his scenes before
leaving in late October to direct his first movie."

Every President and First Lady leave their imprint on the White House. Jackie Kennedy’s Restoration and the Nancy Reagan China stand out.

One of Obama’s imprints has been the introduction of a WH videographer. The public, edited version of the shoots shows up as West Wing Week on YouTube. As with anything political, there is always criticism of what is emphasized, and what ends up being used on the campaign trail, but as the first person to hold that job, Arun Chaudhary told the NYT:

“When people in 20 years see the work that I do, I hope they’ll have a greater understanding of what the president is like personally and what the presidency is like as an institution,” Mr. Chaudhary said. “I’m hoping these moments I’ve saved and put out will even have a richer and more historical flavor.”

For instance, the video he shot of Mr. Obama and Elena Kagan, making bad jokes right before he officially nominated her to the Supreme Court? “What if that had been L.B.J. and Thurgood Marshall?” Mr. Chaudhary said. “In 20 years, that will be amazing.”

Those were the glory days for Sony - the Betamax, Walkman, Playstation success with no pesky Apple to worry about. Well, it is nice to own a movie studio and again create a world where Apple does not matter.

“Sony’s marketing blitz for The Amazing Spider-Man began even before the film hit theaters. Last month, Sony ran a television commercial featuring the superhero to promote the Xperia ion, a new smartphone available on AT&T’s (T) network. In the Spidey movie, the Sony product placements are ubiquitous. When Spider-Man ties up a thug and hangs him from an overpass, for example, a spectator records video with an Xperia phone. When two students watch an online video of Spider-Man’s antics, they do so using a Sony Tablet S. Even the film’s villain, played by Rhys Ifans, uses a Sony Vaio laptop connected to a Sony monitor in his underground laboratory (in photo below), while recording his experiments with a Sony Handycam camcorder.”